Just Like in the Cartoons

   One of the most interesting and important ideas of Christianity and really a moral law of the universe, is that "He who loses his life for Christ will save it, and he who tries to save his life will lose it."  It is something that happens in big and small ways and could be part of scenarios like letting someone have the last piece of dessert and then that is right when someone brings out a better dessert that you get to have.  That is kind of a stupid example but there really are ways that unselfishness pays off in little moments and in great spans of history or just across a lifetime.  It has kind of driven me crazy to try not to be on the losing side of that principle, but I think letting my OCD kick in to obsessively try not to lose anything actually would be one of the instances where I end up losing instead of gaining.

   But anyway the thing I want to mention about it is something that I had to learn pretty early on in my life, which is that things can be confusing when there are situations where you really do need to save your life or someone else's.  That is what happened to me when depression threatened to win out and made me suicidal.  I abruptly had to stop looking for opportunities to suffer on purpose and started having to do everything to hoard as much happiness as I could find.  It changed the way I interacted with people and looked at friendship, and ironically, I think that it helped me be a truer friend instead of looking at people as potential good deeds.  Probably that whole idea of going ahead and losing some Christianity points and choosing some kind of authentic life actually is just another basic example of saving your life by losing it, but it is disguised, because didn't I save my life by saving it?
  God is very clever and He is the one who saves with all of his laws of nature and with all of his intervention beyond those laws. Everyone who trusts in him is guaranteed to be in what basically amounts to a Scooby Doo episode where at the end the villains will say, "Curses, foiled again."  Even those of us who start paying attention to all the patterns around us and trying to deliberately beat the system are like simple Looney Tunes road runners who just go where we are going while all the evil coyote plans backfire all around us.  And in the end, we will be winners, diving into piles of gold like Scrooge McDuck and his nephews in the Ducktales cartoon.